Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert

Author:Lewis Wolpert
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

CHAPTER NINE

Paranormal beliefs

For what a man had rather be true

he more readily believes.

Francis Bacon 1561–1626

A large number of people hold paranormal beliefs even though others claim, strongly, that they are false. These beliefs are all different, but share the property of being in conflict with scientific knowledge, as well as going against everyday experience of causes, and all have a somewhat mystical quality. But more importantly, since they invoke forces and causes outside both ordinary experience and science, they offer believers new powers. Paranormal beliefs include that it is possible to contact the dead; that it is possible to access past lives through hypnosis; that horoscopes can provide useful information about the future; that spiritual healing can cure where conventional medicine fails; that it is possible to transfer thought through telepathy; that angels and ghosts exist, as do monsters and aliens; that it is possible to see what is in someone else’s mind; that spirits exist, and can move objects; and even that levitation is possible. It is also not unreasonable to think that some religious beliefs are paranormal – consider Christ’s miracles, his rising from the dead, and the supposed effectiveness of prayer. Paranormal beliefs may partly be the result of trying to interpret events for which no simple explanation seems possible, together with a preference for invoking mystical causes and forces.

As has been discussed, our brains contain a belief-generating machine, an engine that can produce beliefs with little relation to what is actually true. Many of our beliefs are not based on evidence that we have examined, but on what we have been told by ‘authorities’, and on what an individual might have experienced as being quite out of the normal – something mystical. Coincidences are often over-interpreted, and many people have coincidences that they interpret as telepathy such as knowing which friend was on the phone before they picked it up. There are beliefs about forces, causes and phenomena that it is not possible to replicate, but that open up new possibilities. There is also a general lack of understanding of science and of how to judge evidence about causes that go against science. Socrates, in The Republic, suggested that it might be possible for a ruler to introduce a myth to support his own position; that, for example, he was made from gold, while the masses were made from iron. Would people believe it? Perhaps, he suggested, not at once, but very likely in later generations.

It is also important to recall the evidence from false beliefs to see how our minds seem to have been programmed for mystical and paranormal beliefs, possibly linked to religion. Just recall how taking psychedelic drugs can lead to very strange beliefs. Schumaker refers to the ‘paranormal belief imperative’. He argues that we are pre-eminently autohypnotic creatures and suggests that human beings are ‘a believing phenomenon, who must believe in order to live at all’. Others have suggested that a full apprehension of the human condition would lead to insanity, and

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